Truly Frightening Twist on the Zombie Genre

Rating: 10/10 (19 February 2014)

28 DAYS LATER... is a magnificent example of what talent, imagination, and technical skill can do on a minuscule budget. Filmed for only about eight million dollars in an era when most movies' budgets are in the hundreds of millions, director Danny Boyle and company have managed to give us one of the most truly frightening entries in the zombie genre, with a terrific script and the usual cast of English actors who always seem to me to have an edge on American talent; the people in this small, almost intimate horror film are individuals with distinct personalities, not the stereotypes one often finds in horror movies.
The story, it has to be admitted, makes up in power and energy what it lacks in originality; Boyle and his screenwriter Alex Garland acknowledge debts to all the DEAD films of George Romero, Richard Matheson's I AM LEGEND (also filmed as THE OMEGA MAN), John Wyndham's THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, and other worthy entries in the annals of the zombie film. But it must be said that the genre is a narrow one and similarities are inevitable.
Having acknowledged this, 28 DAYS LATER... is not quite your typical zombie film; the zombie motif has here been crossed with OUTBREAK and THE STAND. The movie opens with a group of very passionate but VERY misguided animal rights activists raiding a research lab and releasing a bunch of chimpanzees, despite the desperate pleas of the lab personnel that the chimps are infected with a virus that causes uncontrollable rage and that is highly infectious. Naturally enough, their self- righteousness renders the activists deaf to the scientists' pleas and they open the cages, and in very short order total chaos ensues and every person in the lab is dead.
Fast forward four weeks. In a hospital, a young man named Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakes from a coma to discover that the London he remembers is no more. The city is still there, but the people are...just...gone. He wanders around calling out, and he grows increasingly desperate until he finally locates a couple of survivors: Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley. Selena, a tough, cynical survivalist, soon gives Jim a brutal lesson with regard to the Infection: once an individual is infected, you have twenty seconds before (s)he becomes a raging, ravening maniac bent on killing. And it isn't long before it happens to Mark and Selena, seeing it before Jim has even a clue, hacks Mark to pieces with a machete. She then informs Jim that she'll do the same to him if necessary.
They move on, picking up a couple of other survivors on the way, until they hear a call on the radio from a quasi-military base near Manchester. The rest of the film chronicles their journey to this "blockade" and what happens to them when they get there. Some of the very last part of the film, at the "military base," is annoyingly predictable; at least I found myself doing a bit of eye-rolling, but in the end it takes away almost nothing; the tension remains high even when some of what is happening on screen gives the viewer a touch of déjà vu.
All told, this is one of the most exciting horror movies I have seen in a very long time. The director and screenwriter have taken what is an old horror meme and presented it with fresh eyes, literally: most of the movie was shot with a Canon high-speed video camera and the result is sometimes a jerky, almost stop-motion effect, only much quicker, that adds to what is already very unsettling stuff. And they are aided and abetted by a great cast that never allows all the "horror movie stuff" going on to rob them of their humanity, even when they are forced to do and witness the unspeakable.
I loved every bone-chilling minute of this one; it may well be the scariest thing I've seen since THE EXORCIST.